The lettering on wood and slate was magnificent; the literary was not.

But then I thought of the arguments that we would have to have at the TLS about what words would be most truly worth the skills of master carver, Martin Cook.

Donne vs Dryden. Shelley vs Shakespeare. Our own poets vs each other.

Enough, enough. No sponsored horticulture for us.

Time to move on — to the ‘show gardens’, larger constructions sponsored by DIY chains as well as newspapers, financial power-houses and northern cities where water was once the important source of power.

Crowds gathered five deep around a ‘gold medal winner’ based, it was said, on Roman ruins in a city of eastern Libya, one now judged to be in the good part of that benighted country. No one seemed to know why they were looking so keenly. The relationship to Ptolemais was not as evident as I had hoped. The beauty was said by some to be something to do with parsnips.

Inside the main tent there were flowers shown without the assistance of human invention. There were walls of daffodils, squares of grasses, bamboo groves, parade grounds of delphiniums and lupins,; and there was a bright giant lily called Nuance (surely an irony that would have graced a truly literary garden) whose bulbs were for sale at £5 for three (from www.hartsnursery.co.uk). Two packs have come home here tonight.

Maybe they will produce their pink-striped bigger-than-any-lily-I-have-ever-seen blooms in Primrose Hill as well as Chelsea. More likely they will not.

It is an axiom hard to deny that gardening is all about hopes and dreams. The greatest proof of visitors’ rejection of gardening reality was the sight today of all the lawn-mower sellers, keen men in brazen sun glasses, keen women in black pencil skirts, all of them ready to sell cutters of grass at unrepeatable cut prices, all of them reminders of gardening as it is, all of them avoided like blight.

May 20, 2011

When I visited one of the last surviving smallpox viruses — in Atlanta almost exactly twenty years ago — it had its own name.

It was called Harvey.

I was there because this final member of a near-extinct species that has lived with mankind for more than a million years was about to be put to death. Harvey and his 100 remaining relatives, including a Mrs King, a Japanese cousin called Yamamoto and a South American known as Garcia, had lived quietly together for the past ten years but time, I was told, was running out on one of the world’s highest-security death rows.

There was an "autoclave" chamber ready to carry out man’s first deliberate "species-cide". There was no international outrage. Environmentalists were not battering down the computer-controlled doors at the Centers for Disease Control. Greenpeace was not planning a rescue. Smallpox viruses like Harvey had few friends.

But like many on death rows throughout America all these members of the Variola family, one of the most virulent killers in history, are with us still, still awaiting the results of their latest retrial.

Harvey’s family was declared extinct in the wild state thirty years ago after an eradication campaign by the World Health Organisation. The few remaining captive specimens were then gathered into two laboratories, in Moscow and in Atlanta, where a final simultaneous roasting was planned to take place in 1993.

Great ceremony was expected when the disease finally joins the dodo. The day was to be presented as a triumph for superpower co-operation and the New World Order. But it never happened.

There are many explanations for this, some political and some scientific.

But, even back in 1991, down where the final deed was to be done, a few doubts seemed to be growing.

On its concrete surface, Atlanta was (and is) a brash modern city where the only direction is forward, where even the trees are sponsored by Coca-Cola and every television seems permanently tuned to hometown CNN. But within the dark red earth blow there lay (and lies) an old Atlanta of fundamentalist Christianity and philosophical scepticism. Perhaps most important, there lay (and lies still) the Atlanta of Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit, the characters that made the city famous for dreams long before cable television and Coke Classic came along.

Uncle Remus’s creator and alter ego, Joel Chandler Harris, an Atlantan journalist, could not see an animal without anthropomorphising it into a children’s friend. The handwritten notes for his famous allegorical tales, left behind on his death in 1908, fill a large library store (also paid for with Coca-Cola cash) barely a few hundred yards from the Centers for Disease Control. What, his admirers then asked, would Harris have made of this extermination business?

In his stories of battle between the weak and the strong, would he have made us love Brer Pox as well as Brer Fox?

I met Walter Barrow, a Baptist lay preacher in a cream synthetic Panama hat and an enthusiast for the lost world of Uncle Remus. "Smallpox is no good to anyone but to destroy the last one of God’s creations why do we need to do that?

What harm is it doing where it is? That is what Mr Harris would have said.

"Hundreds of years ago", Barrow drawled at me, "we thought we had God’s will to destroy every wolf or bear we could see. It was up to us. If we could have exterminated them, we would have. Now we do not think that way. Do we know how we will feel about smallpox in the future?"

Donald Hopkins, a former scientist at the Atlanta centre, had already written his book in which smallpox is the central character, showing how its distinctive brick-shape viruses, invisible until the invention of the electron microscope, struck Stuarts and Habsburgs, Americans and Aztecs and eliminated 10,000 Bihari Indians in a single month as recently as 1974.

He claimed not to be worried about losing the hero of his history, but was deeply concerned, he said, about man’s hubris in destroying the last virus.

"We cannot know the future", he said, "and we cannot justify destroying something that could be of enormous value to us in decades to come, valuable in ways we cannot even conceive of now."

Dr Brian Mahy, who then lead the virologists in Atlanta, was impatient about such objections. Smallpox was for him a rare eradicable evil.

Unlike rival viruses, such as chicken-pox and herpes, Variola does not remain permanently in its victims. That made it unusually vulnerable to new methds of vaccination, containment and elimination in the wild; so man suddenly had the chance to remove its threat entirely.

Mahy recalled his horror 13 years before on learning of the still unexplained infection of Janet Parker, a Birmingham photographer, who was working near a secure smallpox laboratory and became the world’s last victim. His ambition was to remove even the possibility of accident or terrorist theft and to transfer his workers to new tasks.

He wanted not only to destroy all the world’s smallpox viruses (dismissing suggestions that the devious Soviets might keep a bit back), but to destroy the non-infectious DNA building-blocks of the disease.

He feared that if the DNA were kept for research, some fiendish scientist of the future (possibly the fairly near future) might join it to a harmless relative, such as the smallpox vaccine Vaccinia, to produce a new and dangerous epidemic monster.

The very air in the building encouraged fear: or so it seemed to me. Constantly scrubbed and rescrubbed clean, it passed down into the most dangerous areas through red-coiled lines that hung, like snakes, ready for attachment to sealed plastic suits which the workers wore.

Nobody liked to go beyond the slightest normal procedure. When we entered the inner chamber where the viruses were kept, even the unit manager took one look at the chained-and-padlocked fridge (bound with grey masking tape and unopened for many years) and said he wanted to stay there "as little time as possible, please".

Few journalists had ever been shown it before, Mahy said.

I therefore recorded that apart from the chain-bound fridge, which was silver and blue and would suit a security-conscious serial killer, room 318B contained nothing but a box of Kimberley tissues.

The only excitement planned for the near future was for Garcia, Harvey’s South American friend, to be given a brief reprieve from his frozen state, to be warmed up, passed to the care of Janice Knight, a space-suited biologist, and allowed to grow on some monkey cells, bred on a piece of human tissue, before transportation to Moscow.

Mrs Knight and her Russian colleagues hoped that before smallpox was extinguished as a living species, its biological characteristics could be fully mapped by computer. Harvey, named in 1944 after a British nurse who caught the disease from a soldier in Gibraltar, could, for example, be reduced to an 180,000-long list of the nucleotides known to scientists as A,G,C and T.

Smallpox would then be able to be kept in a book instead of a fridge. As long as the correct order of letters had been recorded, the remote possibility of a future Harvey outbreak whether caused by Soviet cheating, an unlucky grave robber, or a neglected African test-tube could be rapidly verified and countered.

I passed on to Mahy some of the worries of Barrow about man playing God with another species. If by some peculiar turn of fate the roles of man and virus were reversed, I asked, how long a list of letters would it take for man’s DNA sequence to be recorded?

About 100 million, he guessed. Would that mean that we, too, could be responsibly removed from the world?

Dr Mahy smiled and went back to his world of rationality and white coats.

For Barrow, standing outside Harris’s house at "The Sign of the Wren’s Nest" it was not much of an answer. "Better not mess with Brer Pox. That’s all," he said.

It seems that Mr Barrow won. As I understand it now, writing from faraway London, a decision on the latest trial is awaited shortly.

May 15, 2011

An old friend (or rather a young friend whom I have known for a long time:thanks Ed) has posted a reminder of my afternoon a decade ago with the virtual explorer, video-game icon and 'spokesmodel' Lara Croft.

It is one of those reminders that in darker moments one may think will alone survive when every other record of one's existence has vanished.

I am certain that when my esteemed Times colleague, Keith Blackmore, first suggested that I be interviewed by Lara, I had no idea of whom he was talking.

I may have affected some knowledge. It was wise for newspaper editors in those early electronic days to pretend familiarity with computer games which one's children, while playing them with enthusiasm, were unlikely to share with their parents.

But I am sure I knew nothing of the character whose creators had decided to write a King Tut scene into her script.

So her script became my script. Yes my script - unless anyone watching now might think that the Editor of The Times ever spoke to anyone, even the most renowned female Indiana Jones in cyberspace, as he now appears to have done.

May 10, 2011

Last weekend I was clearing bedrooms and studies for the pitiless attention of builders, reminding myself of the years when I could never pass a junkshop without coming out with a set of the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica or the complete Mark Twain, recalling how in the 1990s libraries went suddenly out of fashion and the result that so many good books were suddenly in search of a good home.

I now have only three sets of the great 1911 encyclopaedia, having found a grateful new owner for one fine sequence in green cloth. I have walls of brown Oxford Classical texts which are convenient for browsing only the obscurest texts unavailable elsewhere. But at least they were all saved from the junkyard - and, along with Twains and Pepys and Kiplings and Anglo Saxon Chronicles, will be saved again despite the more practical use that could be put to the space.

Hence the horror just now when our esteemed colleague, Catharine Morris, revealed the shame of her Sunday shopping trip near East London's Columbia Road flower market. While I was beside the Berkshire Thames packing past follies, she was downstream finding new ones. In Ezra Street (Sundays only) the history of the TLS is for sale - amid chintz and china company which we surely never deserved. Some ingrate insitution has cast out our ancestors' labours, their noble reports on Books in Basutoland and Eastern Romanity, among crockery and worse.

But now the builders are upon me. Will no one else give these friendly volumes a good home?

May 03, 2011

Miss Tully was the sister — or possibly sister-in-law — of the British Consul in Tripoli at the end of the eighteenth century.

She lived through years of Libyan revolution, systematic torture and macabre assassinations but, if returning to the capital today, would surely feel aggrieved at the decline in standards of public safety.

The Gadaffi of Tripoli in her time was called the Bashaw — and Miss Tully’s letters home about his court provided the first account ‘of the private manners and conduct of this African Despot’.

As readers of its first edition in 1816 were told, it also detailed ‘such sketches of human weakness and vice , the effects of ambition, avarice, envy and intrigue as will scarcely appear credible in the estimation of a European’.

A woman’s walk on a garden wall might be fatal, the bite of a camel even more so, an invitation to take the long indented corridor to the Bashaw’s dining area absolutely so. There were catastrophic plagues and calamitous white slavery.

But there were many compensations. There was no oil then — but gold could be found on the beach and ‘tied in bits of rag about the size of a small nut’, each one worth ten shillings and six pence. There were transparent candied dates, ‘far surpassing in richness any other fruit’. A lucky guest who pleased the Bashaw might be given a piece of Roman paving.

The rules of mourning dress after each bout of plague or murder required that golden finery be dulled and dampened rather than exchanged for black. But this was only a small inconvenience. To read on through the delightful new edition of these letters, published by Hardinge Simpole, is the purest nostalgia.